Murdered in Their Beds

“Something terrible has happened here…” Those were the words uttered by Ross Moore after discovering the bodies of his brother, his family and two houseguests in Villisca, Iowa in June 1912. That horrifying discovery created a legend that became both an unsolved mystery and a haunting that continues to this day. The small town of Villisca received an unwelcome visitor on that dark night and the town was touched by a horror unlike anything that it had seen before – or has seen since. Over the years, the brutal murders committed that night have earned a place in infamy and they remain the most famous in a series of murders that were committed across the prairie during that era. But that night in June was not the first time that the monster who committed the “Villisca Ax Murders” had tasted blood. He blazed a terrible trail across the region in the years before and after the Villisca murders, using the railroad lines to carry out his horrific deeds. This book will bring you the story of the Villisca Ax Murders, along with the history and the hauntings that followed, but it tells another story as well. It is a tale of madness, murder, horror and blood and the story of the “transient butcher” who wreaked havoc in the American Midwest and then vanished into history, his name and face forever unknown. Only his dark legacy lingers behind with us today and it remains a chronicle of one of the bloodiest unsolved murders sprees in our history. The small towns of the American prairie were never the same again.